The Elementals

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The Elementals

By: Michael McDowell

Narrated by: R. C. Bray

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About this listen

After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand. But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty. Inside, something deadly lies in wait. Something that has terrified Dauphin Savage and Luker McCray since they were boys, and which still haunts their nightmares. Something horrific that may be responsible for several terrible and unexplained deaths years earlier–and is now ready to kill again....

A haunted house story unlike any other, Michael McDowell's The Elementals (1981) was one of the finest novels to come out of the horror publishing explosion of the 1970s and '80s. Though best known for his screenplays for Tim Burton's Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, McDowell is now being rediscovered as one of the best modern horror writers and a master of Southern Gothic literature.

Classics

Horror

Haunted

Scary

Fiction

Fantasy

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It’s easy to see why Stephen King was inspired by this story, with its strong, character-driven writing and evocative descriptions of dilapidated mansions, stifling heat and unknowable horror.

In finest Gothic tradition, this story features a slow, measured pace in line with the langurous attitudes of the cast, but slowly ramps up the tension and threat to unbearable levels that rewards the patient listener.

Reading the text with a voice like honeyed gravel, RC Bray perfectly captures each member of the varied and likeable cast. Fans of McDowell’s writing of the screenplay for Beetlejuice will in particular be drawn to India McCray.